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Episode Counts

CaptainPatch's picture
Submitted by CaptainPatch on March 31, 2010 - 9:41pm

John mentioned a few episodes ago that he thought US TV series should reduce their episode count.  My initial reaction was to disagree, but after I thought about it a bit, yeah, that makes sense.  For a lot of series...and my favorite, NCIS definitely comes to mind...there are certainly a few episodes each season that might as well be titled "Contractual Obligation".  Not that they are necessarily bad, but they tend to be not-so-good: formulaic, paint-by-numbers stories.  So I am in agreement, with one caveat.  It sure would be nice if the networks would show their first-run series without interrupting them with reruns.  I don't think there's been a month this year yet in which new episodes of NCIS outnumbered repeats.  And that is annoying.

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John S. Drew's picture

Best Example

Submitted by John S. Drew on April 3, 2010 - 7:18am.

When Patrick McGoohan was developing The Prisoner, it was known that it was going to air on CBS.  McGoohan wanted to do only seven episodes.  That was unheard of back in the sixties.  CBS wanted at least 22.  McGoohan compromised with seventeen and there are plenty of die-hard fans who will tell you that there are stinkers in the bunch.

These days, with the choices that people have in television viewing, the story should dictate the number of episodes, not the number of episodes dictating the story.  The old business model no longer works, yet the networks desperately hang on to it.

—

John
Creator, Producer, All Around God-Like Being
"What?  Too much?"

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Never Going to Happen

Submitted by NickelNDime (not verified) on April 6, 2010 - 11:19pm.

It's going to take one of the basic cable networks to pull in numbers on par with Fox or the CW before the networks will even consider changing their game plan.

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